Zero 10 Art Basel | 2026
“Creativity – this particular example of creativity – lay in neither the programmer alone nor in the program alone, but in the dialog between program and programmer; a dialog resting upon the special and peculiarly intimate relationship that had grown up between us over the years.”
– Harold Cohen, Driving the Creative Machine (2010)
Gazelli Art House presents a solo booth dedicated to pioneering British artist Harold Cohen (1928–2016) at Zero 10 Basel 2026. Best known as the creator of AARON, one of the earliest autonomous systems for artmaking, Cohen first rose to prominence as a leading post-war painter, representing Great Britain at the 1966 Venice Biennale before turning toward computer-generated art in the late 1960s. Bringing together historical paintings, drawings, and live-running code systems, the booth offers audiences a rare opportunity to encounter AARON as Cohen intended: not as a historical artefact, but as a living studio collaborator operating in real time.
The booth traces Cohen’s lifelong investigation into systems, perception, and artistic authorship. From his early painterly abstractions of the 1960s through to the vivid machine-generated compositions of the 1990s and 2000s, the booth situates Cohen not only as a foundational figure in computer art, but as one of the earliest artists to interrogate the relationship between human creativity and algorithmic processes. Decades before AI entered mainstream consciousness, Cohen was already exploring many of the questions that continue to define today’s debates around creativity, agency, and machine intelligence.
The booth builds upon significant recent institutional recognition of Cohen’s practice, following recent exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, M+, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, alongside Gazelli Art House’s solo booth dedicated to Cohen at Frieze Masters 2025. In 2024, the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired AARON codes into its permanent collection, while M+ recently acquired two historic AARON drawings created live at the 1985 Tsukuba Expo in Japan.
Live-running AARON codes will operate throughout the fair: Reconstruction of Mazes (1970–72/2024), KCAT, AARON (2002), and Gijon, AARON (2007). Continuously generating autonomous drawings in real time, these works trace more than three decades of Cohen’s evolving algorithmic thinking, from the early “freehand line” structures of the Maze works through to the increasingly complex compositional and figurative capabilities of AARON’s later years.
The booth presentation opens with All Four (1964), a major early abstract painting exhibited in Harold Cohen: Paintings 1960–65 at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1965. Presented alongside his later machine-generated works, All Four highlights the continuity between Cohen’s painterly practice and his later computational systems. Its looping biomorphic forms and formal codification already suggest Cohen’s growing interest in systems, structure, and rule-based image construction years before he began programming computers.
This formative period was shaped by Cohen’s move to the United States in 1968, where he joined the University of California San Diego and began learning FORTRAN programming. Cohen produced foundational bodies of work such as the Contour Maps, Territorial Maps, and Maze drawings, developing the procedural logic that would later underpin AARON. Rather than instructing the machine what to draw, Cohen became increasingly interested in defining the conditions through which drawings could emerge autonomously. A rare example from this period, Untitled (i23-3578) (1972) belongs to Cohen’s seminal Maze series, produced using his First Generation Drawing Machine and early ‘freehand line’ algorithm. These works marked a pivotal moment in the development of AARON and Cohen’s broader investigations into rule-based artmaking.
A key focus of the booth centres on Cohen’s ‘Painting Machine Era’ of the 1990s, when AARON becamebcapable not only of autonomously generating drawings, but also physically applying colour through custom-built robotic hardware.
Works such as Untitled (i23-3391) (1997) and Machine Painting Series TCM #19 (1997) demonstrate this extraordinary moment in the history of AI art. In Untitled (i23-3391), geometric architectural forms and bold fields of saturated blue, crimson, and yellow reveal the remarkable sophistication of AARON during the late 1990s, as the programme developed increasingly complex relationships between figure, space, and colour, which Cohen would then realise by hand. Machine Painting Series TCM #19 represents a further development in AARON’s evolution, with the system not only generating the composition and colour structure, but also directing Cohen’s custom-built Painting Machine to physically apply dyes onto paper without direct human intervention. Together, these works mark a pivotal moment in the evolution of computer-generated art.
The booth further traces the late evolution of AARON through works such as The Last Machine Age (2015), created during Cohen’s final years. Produced during his ‘finger painting’ period, the work reflects a renewed dialogue between artist and system, as touchscreens replaced earlier plotters and robotic hardware as the interface through which colour, gesture, and compositional structure were shaped.
The works in the booth reveal Harold Cohen’s sustained investigation into the evolving relationship between human creativity and machine intelligence. Across more than four decades, AARON developed from a rule-based drawing system into an increasingly sophisticated artistic collaborator. Together, Cohen and AARON redefined longstanding questions of authorship, establishing a precedent for future generations.
